


The Revenant

by LauraDoloresIssum



Series: Dying Light [1]
Category: Dying Light (Video Game)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Genderfluid Character, Muteness, My original replacement for Kyle Crane, Parkour, Prologue, Prose poetry-esque if I were any good as a poet, Synesthesia, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 15:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19403209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraDoloresIssum/pseuds/LauraDoloresIssum
Summary: A unique special infected prowls the nighttime streets of Harran. When curiosity leads it to nest in the Tower, it must find a way to coexist with the survivors there.The prologue to the main events of Dying Light.





	The Revenant

Climbing, sniffing, curling up in the dark places when the world turned to fire. Hunting, climbing, running, sniffing. Catching sometimes, diving on a slippery fish and trying to hold it down as it squirmed and squirmed and squirmed. In the flames the world turned to drab grays, but in the dark the colors stood out like traffic lights, the city a technicolor playground. The whiffs of smell were red-hot like neon signs, as easy to follow as the blinking red lights and screaming whine of the aircraft as they dipped in low and released the boxes and the flares vomiting billowing scarlet smoke. I wanted to roll around in that smoke, bathe in it, come out coated in that beautiful shade just like I wanted to come out coated with the shimmering blue of the shallows in Old Town. It never stuck, to my disappointment, and the boxes were always followed by a different kind of hunter, in yellow-scarred black.

Yellow was a color to look out for in Harran, for those with enough sense left to register anything besides sound, motion, and the smell of sweat. The quiet ones wore yellow t-shirts and kneepads, and the loud ones had yellow paint splashed across their armor. I liked the loud ones. They walked loudly, they talked loudly, their cigarettes could be smelled for a block, they carried shotguns, handguns, and automatic rifles, and they sometimes got stuck outside at night. Easy to take from behind.

The quiet ones were rare sightings, like birdwatching. I would hear the sound of fast footsteps in the daytime and squint up through a tiny space in the boarded-up windows, and see a running gray shape flash across my limited vision as it hurled itself from roof to roof. It was the shape you looked for, like with birds; the shape of kneepads and a harness, a painful streak that meant a light strapped to the forehead, often a backpack. At night, I only ever saw the dead ones, but my old supply crates and duffel bags still boasted a few sunny t-shirts.

I kept my caches scattered around the city, mostly in the places the yellow wouldn’t go; the sealed, forgotten places where the body bags had mummified months ago. My favorite roost was the office in Old Town, a huge, airy building filled with desks and glistening panes of glass, a rarity now. Yellow-smeared black had taken up all five floors; they didn’t anymore. Some of them had been locked outside and the rest had been taken out by a planted cache of poisoned food. No bullets in the drywall, no gory mess to clean, and the vast luxury of private space. With the lights all off and the shades pulled down, it was a haven in the daytime.

Like the living, I scavenged as well as hunted. Run. Climb. Sniff. Push. Pull. Pry. Sliding my legs over sills through broken mouths edged with glass teeth to get to some cabinets. Lick the edges of the kitchen doors, curious for the ingrained memory of food-coated fingers. Grab the food, the water, the batteries, the phones, the books, run to the next. My nights were filled with crates snapping under crowbars, the cold rattle of traincar doors moving sideways like a pantomime of the rusting wheels, the feeling of hitting roofs just in time to leap to the next one. I had many creative uses for credit cards, screwdrivers, paperclips, and old hairpins. I knew I was not like the others, so clumsy, so full of rage and hunger, but I didn’t consider anything for very long. It felt good to move fast, good to clutch and carry back, good to feel master of a forest of roofs, so I did. Reasons were irrelevant when you caught something shiny between your teeth.

Poking around the roof, gazing out over a brightening sea of color as the last fires began to fade in the sky. A flash of scent white-hot like an airborne brand. Not cigarettes. Wetter, more sour, like powdered concrete, and another, antiseptic like decayed lime-green, the smell of fresh-plucked Antizin. I dashed to the edge. My fingers clutched the roof, crouching low. A yellow shirt, down on the ground, back to the wall, caught outside too close to dark. I vaulted the roof, down the side, grabbing and releasing railings quickly, back and forth, and caught myself silently on the ground.

Yellow was looking around for the gleam of the three mouths’ eyes. Saw mine instead, a flash of silver reflected off its own. It bolted. I ran after, quieter and quicker, turning tighter corners and jumping higher, wanting to grab the case it held, but no matter how fast I was whenever I got too close its back would scream a light at me that blistered my face and sent me staggering. These quiet ones were smart. Reluctantly, I followed parallel, out of range, rubbing my aching face as the blisters healed and fell away.

The loud ones lived on the ground, behind hefty swaggers and thick loops of barbed wire. The quiet ones were more interesting; they disappeared into the center of the slums, into an old tenement building rimmed with horrible blue light. I followed it back but couldn’t even look at the doorway as it vanished. Find another way. That way turned out to be two firecrackers lobbed at the lights, the last ones of course, glad to be rid of the noises. They broke and toppled, yellow poles and black rubber. I clung above the reinforced door as they unlocked and two yellow shirts emerged. One tinkered with the lights amid sun-hot flares while the other stood in the doorway with a rifle. I was already past them. More lights around the floor where the concrete stairs had been destroyed, but a wall scrabble and a spring with eyes closed did the trick with minor burns. Old concrete and mold. A large painted number One on the wall.

The stairs were barricaded, and the elevator came just in time for me to slip in before the guards came back. Floors Two through Seventeen were abandoned. I could open a window from inside and go back and forth freely, but where to roost? Didn’t want to be discovered if they came down and found a hoard of weapons or cash. The elevator was obvious. I climbed up through the panel. The gap between the roof of the elevator and the top of the shaft was very snug. Morning was coming, and I had dreams about roaming through the building and climbing up to the roof.

The elevator quickly grew to be my favorite roost in the slums. I would rest there in the daytime, safe from the light behind several layers of concrete and piled between blankets, idly sniffing the reddish glow of the cables. Barely half a meter away, I would hear chatter. I had forgotten the sound of words except as clues to hunt by, and in the elevator people felt safe, and I felt safe being near them. There was something terribly relaxing about lying there in the smell of hot metal, cosseted in the silence and the darkness, playing secret agent voyeur. I did not know names, but over a few weeks I learned to recognize voices. I knew who whistled and sang when they were alone, and who sucked in nervous breath every time the elevator gave an unexpected jolt. I heard many snippets of conversation that I did not understand, and several private breakdowns where a headset came in handy. I learned that the place was called the Tower, and organized by an Australian named Brecken. I learned that the yellow that went outside were called runners. I learned most of the people there were infected and needed regular shots of Antizin. I learned that they had plenty of water, but very little of it was drinkable.

I usually used a window to climb in and out, high up and out of sight, but for heavy loads I risked the changing of the guard, a five-minute gap right before sunrise, when the three mouths were scrambling back to their burrows and the loud yellow hadn’t ventured out yet. Nobody had noticed the loose square of chainlink in their barricade. One night I got caught, just a little too slow to follow my bag through before the yellow rounded the corner. A rush of hormones hit my nose. The scream scraped my ears like sandpaper. I was already diving, fingers clutching wood and pushing, feeling splinters fly behind me as a bullet passed my heel, and gone, scrabbling up the stairs on all fours, bag forgotten, radio sounds behind me but couldn’t remember what words were. Pull open the second floor doors, scramble inside the shaft, safe, on the top, safe, safe.

Running steps, then a ding. I rose. I stopped. Doors opened.

“Tell me exactly what you saw.” Foreign, emphatic, afraid. I fought to stay focused, to concentrate on meaning. A pause, and then someone whispered.

“Brecken, the kids—”

He sighed. “It’s okay, kids. Go back to sleep.” Footsteps in instead of out. Button, and the doors closed.

“I turned around and it was right there—”

“What did it look like?”

“I think it was a Feral with four arms, some weird mutation. I don’t know how it got in! It took one look at me and hauled ass through a hole in the barricade. It had claws on its feet, big ones. It was so fucking fast.”

“ _Into_ the building?”

“Yes! That’s what I was trying to tell you over the radio.”

“Goddammit!” I felt Brecken kick the wall. “We should have cleared those levels months ago.” Sound of opening radio channel. “Salma. How did it get in?”

“Lights and fences are all operational, Brecken,” a faint voice said. “I’m not seeing any cracks in the walls.”

“Copy that. Has it just been living here this whole time?”

“Timur said that the outside lights were knocked down by a Volatile a few weeks ago. Could it have gotten in then?”

Brecken’s sound profile paced the elevator. “If it’s been in the Tower for weeks and hasn’t been spotted by anyone yet, it probably got trapped in the middle floors and couldn’t figure out how to get out. As soon as it’s morning, I’ll get people to double-check for holes, and for God’s sake keep the kids away from them. It’ll have to wait until we find water. We’ll need every runner we have. It’ll be hell clearing those floors with nowhere to get away.”

I skittered down to the middle floors as soon as I could and sat on the bed I tended to use, next to an open window. It had begun to rain outside, favorite type of weather. I wasn’t a hardened fighter. I dealt with groups of loud yellow no larger than four and squabbled occasionally with the three mouths over meat. I didn’t want to end up backed into a corner with a dozen guns in my face. I liked living here and hearing stupid chatter about the last TV show someone watched before the Internet got jammed and how sick they were of prepackaged halva and the first thing they were going to do once they got out of quarantine. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed voices. Well, technically I couldn’t miss something I couldn’t remember. If I wanted to stay, I had to catch them off balance.

That evening, I took the elevator up to the top floor. The woman on guard yelled, muffled by the glass, and brought up her rifle. Slowly, I raised a hand and waggled the large case of water bottles I was holding. I held it there as realization slowly dawned in her eyes. She backed away, then when I held still, pulled out her radio.

The place was coated with fresh smells. I could see them standing out like streaks of bright paint, traces of sweat and hair and skin and spit, the odor of warm bodies between my fingers. I fought to keep myself from slipping back into the mental shorthand of the hunt, thoughtless and reflexive. It was hard to think in solid concepts. It was hard to measure the click of my feet except as pure sense, to distinguish click from feet, feet from floor, moment from moment. There was no more linearity for me, no more tick-tock of my heartbeat. I only had The Time, a compressed infinity of sine curving suns and moons. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow were indistinguishable. Some of the things I remembered I probably hadn’t done yet. And I was sure I had already forgotten most of the things I had done in the time that I could still access. How long had I been dead? A week, a year? There was no telling, only The Time. And bounding The Time, a bloody pool of vomit staining the rug in an empty apartment in Old Town, back arching on the floor, blinking in and out of existence moment by moment, blinking like the digital zeros on the bookcase, consciousness fading as the power began to fail. I couldn’t remember if that was how The Time started or ended. I didn’t know if it was my apartment, a stranger’s, or a friend’s. Whenever I tried to think I could feel my brain fighting to spark, but my synapses were severed, like the two halves of Infamy Bridge. Maybe I’d been smart, once upon a time.

They tried to take the water from me, but I held it to my chest and growled until they stopped. I was led through a metal door, then double wooden doors. White light flooded my vision; I twisted my head away and spat. After a moment, my eyes adjusted. A studio apartment, well furnished. My fingers itched staring at the cabinets. A television showing Antizin drops, and a glass wall facing out onto a balcony. I was pushed down onto a couch. Two yellow behind me, rifles pointed at my head. A middling man with light eyes stood across from me, along with a dark woman with dreadlocks pulled into a ponytail and a very young man in a flannel. Behind them, Harran glittered like a row of jewelry boxes. Reflected distantly was my face, a stranger’s face, freshly unknown every time. I guessed the light-eyed man was Brecken. He stood in a proprietary way.

“Can you understand me?” The accent verified my hunch.

I nodded.

“Holy shit.” I knew that voice. His name was Rahim. He lowered his gun and took a few steps toward me before the woman pulled him back. “Holy shit. Brecken—”

Brecken leaned down. His light blue irises, the alarmingly specific color of pre-stressed jeans, felt like they were boring a hole in my face. My jaw twitched in pain. “What are you doing in our Tower?”

I pointed out the window to the east and held up my hands to shield my face. I showed him the digital watch I wore.

“Can’t you speak?”

I shook my head, and tried to talk. A gentle choked “ah-ah,” came out. I reached across the table for a pen, and instantly there was the sound of half a dozen guns cocking. Hands up, I shrank back into the couch.

“What is your name?” the woman asked. I thought she might be Jade, the head of the runners, but I had mostly heard her voice distorted by static.

I shrugged.

“You don’t have a name?”

I shook my head and made a writing motion. After a moment — they clearly didn’t want to touch me — a pen and paper were thrust in my direction. On it, I wrote left-handed, _I don’t remember much. I hunt, I hide, I scavenge, I run. I know how to do these things. If you let me come and go freely, we can help each other out._

“How about you start by giving us that water?” said Brecken.

Moving slowly, I plunked the water on the table and gestured for them to lower their guns. Brecken glanced at Jade, who seemed to have authority over the guards. After a moment, she nodded. In return, I pushed it across the table.

She inspected it suspiciously, handling the package with a cloth. “And what would you want in return?”

I pulled up my hands in a gun posture and mimed firing it, then put my hands over my ears and shook my head. Then I mimed screwing on a silencer. Rahim’s jaw dropped.

“You use guns?”

I drew three fingers down my chest in a clawing gesture, and soundlessly mimicked a loud yellow spraying rifle ammo everywhere. Then I aimed my finger gun between his eyes and mimed pulling the trigger and put a finger to my lips.

“Rais,” said Jade. “You know him?”

The word meant nothing to me. I shrugged and shook my head, and mimed opening two latches on a large box.

Jade gave me a hard stare. “Some of the drops have Antizin. Do you know what that is?”

I nodded and made an injecting motion.

“We don’t kill if we can help it. But we need that Antizin. If you see any at all—”

I reached into my jacket and pulled out a ragged block of twelve vials in gray foam. The silence was deafening. Brecken took it, his fingers shaking slightly.

“He can bring back night drops. Imagine not paying tribute to Rais!”

“ _No_ , Rahim. We’re not letting an Infected roam free around the Tower. Brecken, look at those claws. This thing could drag off a child in seconds.”

Brecken glanced at the Antizin, then me. “We’ll give you a radio. You’ll notify Karim every time you go to an inhabited floor. If we find you up here and you didn’t give a heads-up, we shoot on sight.”

I nodded.

“Brecken.” Jade, warningly. “Be careful.”

“I will. Discussion over, both of you.”

Jade led me down the hall, past people who gripped their guns tighter as I passed. They didn’t all wear yellow, which bewildered me. It was a new experience to see so many of them, and standing so still. So jumpable.

Apartment 1804 had SIGNALS hastily daubed over the doorway in black paint. Inside, the kitchen had been converted into a command center, while the living room and bedroom had been filled with cots and sleeping bags. Several yellow were asleep on them, snoring loudly. A dark woman in camo with shorn hair was bending over a radio on the kitchen counter, talking into it. The cabinets behind her had the doors removed and now held supplies like rope, duct tape, climbing chalk, and crowbars.

“This is Ayo, or Signals on the airwaves,” said Jade quietly. “When you lend a hand, she’s who you’re gonna liaise with to find a running partner. There are two kinds of runners, scouts who do recon and support, and vanguards who do the dirty fighting. We mostly do runs in dyads or triads, unless Brecken or I decide you’re good enough to risk a solo mission. Heroes die around here.”

We went to the other side of the floor, to the apartment next to the shop. It was marked SECURITY, and had a similar setup. A tough-looking man sat at the kitchen table, frowning into a laptop. He had a black ponytail, and wore a fur-trimmed jacket and a headset.

“What the hell is that? Is that a biter?”

He had a Russian accent and smelled different than the rest, like loud yellow, but an old smell. I put my nose very close to his jacket before he shoved my head away.

“What the fuck?! Aldemir, are you sure I shouldn’t blow her head off?” I stared down the barrel of a pistol he had leveled at my face. I licked the muzzle curiously. Old traces of Antizin, shitake mushroom, and blood. Interesting story somewhere in there.

“Karim, put that away. It’s… an ally. It’ll be living down on Thirteen. I want you to give it a radio.”

Karim took a moment to process this. He dug through a cardboard box by his chair and pulled out a battered portable. He tuned it to the correct channel and handed it to me. As I examined it, he said to Jade, “Mind if I ask why?”

“It’s going to be checking in with you every time it comes up here. When it does, I want you to tell the guards it’s on the way.”

“She’s… self-aware?” He sounded slightly impressed. “That’s new.” He turned his head a little. “Any more like you?”

I shook my head.

“It’s gonna be coming and going. Might be doing some jobs for Brecken part-time.”

“‘Jobs’? Is this some kind of insane plan to murder Rais? She’s a hundred pounds soaking wet.” He gave my face a second look. “Looks fast though. I’d watch that fight. How would you like to kill a man, little sis? He’s got good stuff, if you can pry it off his corpse.”

I clacked my teeth together.

Karim chuckled. “Okay, I like you. What’s your name?”

I shrugged and coughed out my ah-ah-ah.

“You can’t talk? How are you supposed to use a radio?”

I held up my fingers to it and snapped three times.

“I suppose.” He suddenly held up a finger and put the other hand to his headset. “Here. Uh huh.” He listened for a second. “Is she turning? …See what you can do to get her on her feet. …Okay.”

He tapped the headset, and said to Jade, “Another guard down with flu. I’m past a skeleton crew at this point and working with marrow. About the only good thing I can say about Rais is at least he has plenty of liquor and drugs to pass around when the soldiers aren’t feeling so good. That, and the threat of dismemberment tends to get people out of bed in the morning.”

Jade sighed. “We’re all getting done with what we have.”

“Exactly, boss.”

I trod carefully for time, keeping my head hunched and giving all the interesting smells a wide berth. I tended to stay to myself, coming to visit the inhabited floors infrequently and at odd hours. People grew more used to finding me curled up in empty rooms or ducking out of hallways when I heard someone coming.

Tentatively, the guards began to joke with me as I went past.

“It’s two am, you’re late.”

“Here comes the Revenant, prowling around for his murderer again. Man, look at those claws. I’m glad I’m not that guy.”

I wasn’t sure who had originally gotten that idea, but it took hold fast. People began to whisper.

“I heard he can’t rest easy until he kills the man that killed him.”

Soon, that was the story they were all telling whether I liked it or not.

“I think I shot the zombie that killed you today. Big guy, scruffy beard, sandals, white shirt? No? Thank god, ‘cause that was my dad. He’s at peace now.”

“I’m going out to the Slabs, lots of old zed in there. Want me to keep an eye out for you-know-who for you? I see. Believe me, I get it. If I ever find the son of a bitch that… well, I’m not letting anyone else kill him.”

“Hey, Revenant! I got some news that’s gonna make you a very happy zombie! I snagged that motherfucker for you. There was this skinny European tourist, and I just know that was the fucker that got you from behind, he looked like the sort of bastard that would kill a woman to save his own skin. So you can rest easy. It’s okay now.”

I guess they liked the idea of the dead getting back up for a reason.

I was sitting on the roof, legs dangling over the edge, gazing down at the city. In the wind it swirled like a watercolor. I heard loud footsteps behind me. I sniffed. Rahim.

“You know, I’m almost getting used to seeing you up here. It’s so wrong. Move over.”

I moved. I liked Rahim, despite his muleheadedness and adolescent stupidity. And he liked me, because I was a good listener.

He sat down, a little farther back from the edge. His night vision goggles were pulled down over his eyes. I could see a faint electronic glow in them. “You really can’t recognize me?”

I scratched an itch on the hardened flesh around one of the spikes protruding out of my scalp. I tapped my ear, then my nose, and nodded.

“Doctor Zere wants to know why you aren’t covered in sores like the rest of them. You’re still photosensitive, right?”

I shrugged disinterestedly.

“I’m not trying to pump you for information or anything, I’m just… well, it’s interesting. You know. Talking to a monster above a hundred and fifty meter drop.” He flicked a coin over the edge, and we watched it fall. Somewhere in the distance far, far below, a three mouths screamed.

“I feel so useless here, you know? People are sick and dying and all Brecken and Jade tell me is how I’m too young to get involved. They keep making up bullshit for me to do, like repaint the common area or recheck the barricades for the millionth time. It’s not like being a kid makes a damn bit of difference. The dead will still bite me, Rais’s thugs will still break my legs. One of these days, somebody’s going to die trying to protect me, because all I’m allowed to do is run around up here,” he jerked a thumb backwards, where Brecken had set up a complicated obstacle course on the roof, “and take inventory. I need to haul my own weight. You know?”

He glanced over at me. I made an explosion motion with my hands and shook my head violently.

“It’s a good plan. It is. As long as we’re careful—”

I cut him off with a large slicing motion and made the explosion gesture again. I pulled out my notepad and scribbled, _You’ll blow yourself up_.

“No, I won’t! We have it all planned out.”

I gave him a disgusted look.

“Ugh, don’t make that face. You make that face just like my sister does. It’s not right.”

I stretched out a leg and idly clasped and unclasped a foot. Thinking was still not my strong suit, but it was easier to do in the Tower, surrounded by people. Rahim watched my opposable claw in fascination.

 _Better idea_. I indicated the two of us. _You and me_ , I pointed to the east horizon, _morning_.

“I thought nocturnals can’t go out in the sun.”

I put my finger to my lips. _We’re not going far_. I pointed to a nearby block of unfinished apartments, barely a fifteen meter dash across the raised plaza, a skeleton of a building apart from the other bombed or burned skeletons, not quite as tall. Close, easy to secure.

I could hear the excited gleam in Rahim’s eyes. “The nightmares roost there in the daytime. That’s one of the reasons we almost never go out at night. You get mauled almost the second you step out the door, unless you’re very good or very lucky. That’s the first place we thought of detonating, but it’s too close to the Tower. You have a plan for clearing it out?”

_Just level by level. Fill it with sun. Scorch them out._

Rahim shook his head. “There’s no way in the doors. Our best lockpicker died trying to get them open before a nocturnal got her.”

That stumped me. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scenarios, fast and sensory in my head. No way across from here. Would kill myself in the fire opening all the curtains by myself. Not strong enough to carry Rahim up the side. Could drop a rope, but that would leave us with angry three mouths on both sides. Easy for him to fatally fall climbing down in a hurry, and they were smart enough to cut a rope. Would both die trapped in a building with no safe escape. Could save myself, break a window, leap out, panic through the burning for shelter, but no leaving Rahim. Not an option.

_Window? Open door from inside. Fire push-bar, like downstairs. Meet you there._

Rahim leapt to his feet and raced down the side of the roof. I was running after before I was really aware of it. When he stopped, I grabbed both his shoulders, but channeled the instinctive biting motion into thrusting my head over his shoulder to see what he was pointing at. It looked to be the yellow crane, sitting among a number of other dented and graffiti-covered construction equipment.

“I climb up the crane while you open the door and meet you on the roof! We push them down and out. If we need to retreat, they’re not gonna follow. Not at that height.”

I thought and nodded. Up meant safe.

“I’m gonna go get ready right now. Who knows, I might actually sleep tonight!”

I hesitated as he jogged toward the stairs. Telling him this was dangerous would probably make him more determined to do it. I darted forward and grabbed his shoulder. _You probably won’t live._

“If I’m going to die, I want to die doing something, not just sitting around.” He pushed me off. “We’re doing this.”

While he went into the barracks, I made my way to the building. The doors were boarded up with corrugated yellow metal reading Quarantine Zone; hissing and spitting, I eventually ripped them off. I rattled the knobs. No way in. A passing three-mouths growled at me, its tongue lolling permanently out of its face. The others might not attack me on sight like they did the living, but I had never gotten along with three-mouths. They saw me as competition, I think. They were complicated, like the living, and I didn’t understand them very well.

I pretended to back down and made my way around the side. It didn’t follow, so I grabbed an outcropping and started to climb. No thoughts, for now. I lost myself in a rush of sensation. The concrete was fresh, many years newer than the Tower. There was some black smears from wounded three-mouths around the sills, but none of the dead did much climbing other than me. The Hunter had. I remembered the sound its tendrils had made, exactly like someone loudly slurping up saucy spaghetti. But the Hunter was gone from a fall long ago, and I hadn’t met another since. Good riddance.

I eventually reached the top, a little sore but otherwise well. The living got tired and slowed down, but I had forgotten how. The roof was only technically complete, but there was a stairwell and a door, and they were always built to be openeable from the roof. I waited inside.

I left my reverie with a start. The light had slowly gotten worse as I had been waiting, but now there were… other sounds. Revving. I recognized the sound the way I knew the names of objects but had no memory of learning them. I opened the door a crack and squinted into the sunlight to see the huge yellow crane moving. It was rising and turning to make a kind of bridge between the tops of the apartments. Rahim had a good eye, it fit almost perfectly.

I withdrew into the dark and waited.

My watch said twenty small numbers had passed when I began hearing whoops. Rahim, yelling from some unrecognizable emotion crossing the top of the crane. I heard it creak in the wind. I heard, just barely, his footsteps on the metal, then concrete.

“Whooo! That was a rush! Hey, Revenant, you up here?”

I cracked the door again.

“Man, you can’t see anything in here. Ugh, it smells like zombie. Fucking reeks.” Rahim felt the walls blindly. I grabbed the back of his shirt to keep him from falling down the stairs.

“Well, I’m ready.”

He clicked on a UV flashlight, and horrible fire enveloped me. It took all my restraint not to try to bite it out of his hand. I flattened against the door, only my terror of the worse heat behind it keeping me from running outside. My deep wail echoed down the stairwell.

He redirected the beam. “Sorry. I thought you said you were different.”

Wincing and feeling where my body had blistered up into caked black callouses, I scribbled angrily, _not that different you dumb son of a bitch ow fuck fuck me ow._

He laughed. “You’ve got my potty mouth now.”

I slowly slid down the door. My tongue was shivering, my fingers twitching, my teeth felt like they had a life of their own. I wanted to bite, tear, and that was a dangerous desire with Rahim right there. I could feel myself slamming into him, tumbling locked down the stairs, blood spurting into my mouth as I bit into his neck or his face, the light hitting me over and over again like a brick wall. For a moment I was convinced I had just killed him.

I was still curled up at the bottom of the door.

“Hey. Hey, are you… okay?” Rahim’s voice was suddenly guarded, like he was talking to a dangerous animal. I realized I had been growling.

I staggered to my feet, claws scraping the stairs. I nodded, made a few uncomfortable noises, and gave him a quick thumbs-up.

“Okay.” He glanced down at the flashlight. “Maybe I should go first.”

He was carrying several machetes across his back. I realized too late I hadn’t thought to bring a weapon. The smell of hunting filled my brain, the smell of fresh bodies and the very particular scent of evolved infected, not rotting but not alive either. I restrained the urge to put my jaws around something.

The upper floors were almost empty. A few of the ones that shambled around were there, in bright yellow work clothes, easy to dispatch. The three-mouths did not like heights, they liked being close to the ground or underneath it. Every floor, the tactic was the same. I would sweep the hallways and Rahim would pull off all the plastic sheeting until there was nowhere to go but down.

In the lower six floors, we started hitting the three-mouths. They got weaker in the daytime, but they were still a serious threat. I would cordon off the floor by shutting all the doors that weren’t broken, and fry any three-mouths in the hall with the flashlight so Rahim could advance and take their heads off. Then one by one, we advanced into the apartments. I used my body as a shield around Rahim, circling him, keeping their grasping hands off of him, confusing their sense of smell. As soon as he reached a curtain he would rip it off, and we would all scream and flee indiscriminately for shelter, and as soon as I got my bearings Rahim would wade into the next room and the cycle would repeat. The machetes saw heavy use too.

It was a long and grueling process, and night was coloring the sky by the time we dropped down to the lobby together, exhausted, watching wounded three-mouths flee through the unchained door in a vain attempt to seek shelter before the virus in them burned to death. Rahim was all scratched up and had been bitten several times, and he might need more than one dose of Antizin, but he hadn’t been mauled to death and the building was cleared. I waved the flickering UV beam away from my eyes. One of them had been seared blind and was swollen shut by blisters, and black blood welled from slashes down my chest and back. I wasn’t sure which of us looked worse.

Rahim chuckled. “I can’t believe we survived that. I’m not even a real freerunner yet. Holy shit. Shit. Wow. Man, I am getting so drunk tonight, if Jade doesn’t kill me first.”

I held out my hand. He shook it gingerly, avoiding my sharp climbing nails.

_I know the place isn’t fit for much, but…_

“Hell, any real estate is more than we had yesterday. C’mon, let’s chain the doors back up.”

We chained the doors and trudged home across the crane. The first thing I saw on the other side was Jade, arms folded.

“You two look terrible,” she said unsympathetically as we dropped from the end of the crane. “Not bad enough, in my opinion. What you did was fucking stupid and I hope you have scars to remember it by.”

“Jade—” Rahim began. Her look of cold fury silenced him.

“Go see Doctor Lena. After that, we’re having words. Revenant, we’re talking now.”

The second Rahim was gone she punched me on my blind side, hard. I could smell the blood instantly, gashes in her knuckles welling up from the tiny spikes around my hairline and jaw. My palms smacked the concrete as I fell, claws leaving white scrapes. I gingerly probed the inside of my cheek with my tongue. There was an oozing split there the width of her fist.

“I expect Rahim to be a stupid little shithead, but I thought you had more brains than that. Did you two seriously try to clear that entire building? By yourselves? It’s almost worse than his explosives idea.”

I held up my notepad and started scribbling, but Jade slapped it out of my hand before I got more than a few words out.

“I know you got it done. If you had failed, you wouldn’t be alive. You know what that’s called by people with working brains? That’s called _results-oriented thinking_. If I score a winning lottery ticket once, that doesn’t mean I was guaranteed to win. We do not have the manpower to do something like that safely, or we would have already. God, if I had a gun I’d shoot you with it right now. Our whole family is dead!”

She shoved me. “Now get out of here before I hit you again.”

I did so. If I remembered my family, I might have understood a bit better.

I was heading down to the elevator when Brecken caught me in the hallway.

“Revenant. Just the man-woman-something-thing I wanted to see.” He grabbed the collar of my shirt and bodily hauled me toward his office like I was a dog that had shat on the rug. That instantly did what being punched had not. Angrily, I shoved him hard enough to knock him to the floor and snapped. My jaw unhinged to show several rows of teeth. The guard by the elevator stood from her crate, rifle half-aimed at me.

Brecken got back up, swaying a little and feeling the back of his head. His hand came away bloody. “Ohh. You are not improving my night.”

Restraining my glare, I walked with as much dignity as I could to HQ and took my usual place on the couch.

Brecken followed me in, shutting the doors more violently than needed. He paced back and forth by the television, clearly working to restrain his temper. “First off: Don’t you ever put your hands on me again. Second: did you and Rahim go and try to secure that unfinished complex by yourselves?”

If taking a calming breath would have slowed my metabolism, I’d have done it. I nodded.

“Why? Why would you do something so utterly dumbassed? Are you capable of taking down a nightmare in a stand up fight all of a sudden? And why would you bring Rahim?! Rahim, of all people! The one with the least experience, the least training, and the most likely to give Jade a fucking aneurysm! That’s her last living relative for fuck’s sake! Of all the people in Harran, you do not want to be on Jade Aldemir’s bad side! I’d sooner get in a knifefight with Rais than piss off the Scorpion!”

He sighed, his palms flat on the table. “You scared us both fucking shitless, and I can tell from that giant bruise on your face that she already gave you a piece of her mind. What the fuck were you thinking?”

We kept a dedicated pad of paper in the Headquarters specifically so I could access it. I crossed to his desk, grabbed it out of the drawer, and scribbled,

_You, I, and Jade all know that that boy is a pressure cooker on legs. He’s locked up in this building with nothing to do while people are dying around him. At least by choosing a controlled space and getting him to cooperate with an actual plan I gave him a half-decent chance of survival, instead of waiting for him to sneak out at night or try to blow up a building._

I tore it off and shoved it at him, and kept going without waiting to see how he’d react.

_The three-mouths are sluggish in the daytime, and they don’t fight when there’s sun burning them alive. Four competent vanguards could have handled it. But for some reason, your Tower can’t get its shit together to handle basic territory management! The reason you’re stuck fighting zombies on all sides is that you aren’t organized enough to secure more than a dozen safezones in a city that’s, remind me because my brain isn’t so good with numbers anymore, how many kilometers again? You could be mowing through streets, clearing buildings, reinforcing them with barbed wire and lights, driving wedges between the walker clusters and whittling them down so they aren’t so massed anymore. You’re just sitting in here, arguing over your food rations, on the razor edge of your Antizin stocks, while Rais’s Talons shake down every unaligned settlement from here to Infamy Bridge for their aspirin. If Rahim is right about one thing in his life, it’s this is an attrition game, and you are not playing the attrition game, you’re playing the hold-out-until-rescue game. WHO IS COMING TO RESCUE YOU AGAIN?_

I stopped, mostly because I was getting terrible writer’s cramp. I smacked the rest in Brecken’s direction, and rubbed my face against my aching left digits.

His face grew continually stormier as he read the rest of it. To his credit, he did not throw me out or have me shot immediately. He sighed again, and stared frustratedly out at the flaming mess of Harran.

“The thing about the Tower,” he said without looking at me, “is that it’s filthy. There’s papers and shit everywhere, the garbage chute is overflowing with bags, there’s not much organization to where things go. Drives me crazy.”

There was a brief silence.

“Don’t piss off Jade anymore. And… I’ll talk with her about getting Rahim into some yellow. At least on a probationary basis. I’m not a strategist, Revenant, I don’t know urban warfare. But I’ll do what I can. In return, I need you to do something for us. If we’re gonna be expanding, that means taking in survivors, probably wounded ones, who’ll need antibiotics and Antizin. We’ll need at least one dedicated medical floor, and right now we don’t have the space. I don’t care how much pain you’re in right now. Get on it.”

The ones that shambled and smelled like rot still filled seventeen and eighteen. It took three hours to corral them all out of a window by leaving dangling chunks of meat wrapped in sweat-soaked rags hanging just above reach, helped by the occasional firm kick to the ass.

I reported back to Brecken, and found him with a map of the city, sketching out possible avenues of attack. Jade was with him, and from the stinging look she gave me she was still angry. That was fair, I supposed. There was also a pale-skinned, redheaded man I didn’t recognize.

“The building clear?”

I nodded.

“Good. This is a friend of ours. It’s called the Revenant.”

The red-haired man gave me a quick, expressionless hand-raise hello. “Making friends with the zombies now?” His voice wasn’t judgmental. “As long as you know what you’re doing.” He turned back to the map. “How is this electrified fence idea supposed to work?”

“You’d have to ask the technicians. But the nightmares don’t like being zapped. Neither do the runners.”

“When you say runners, do you mean your freerunners, or the zombies that run and scream at you?”

“Well, our people don’t enjoy being electrified much either.”

The stranger didn’t smile. “You need to give one of them a different name. ‘Runners headed this way’ needs to have one, exact meaning. Otherwise half of your people will assume the one and the other half will assume the other, and by the time you slap yourselves on the forehead, half of your people will be dead.”

Jade wordlessly slid my notebook across to me, not meeting my eyes. I decided to take it and leave them to it while I went and got some rest. Between clearing the complex, the arguments, and then emptying the Tower floors, the black welts on my body had barely had time to start peeling off yet.

As I passed the stairs, I bumped into a foreign-looking man whose right face was a mass of fresh scar tissue. He was wearing bloodstained clothing and had the groggy look of someone who was still heavily medicated. His eyes passed over my four arms without seeming to realize they were there.

“Hey, bro, this is the, uh, fucking headquarters, right? I was told that Brecken was gonna be here.” His nasal accent rendered him almost incomprehensible. “Man, what happened to you? You look like utter shit. Are those horns?”

I eyed him dubiously. _You shouldn’t be walking. You should go back to medical. I’ll tell Brecken you want to talk to him when you’re conscious._

He squinted at the paper. “Uhhh.” He felt his head. “Honestly, maybe you’re right. Look, tell your boss that, uh, I’m here to help. M’name’s Kyle Crane. Medical’s down, right? I don’t remember if I went up or down the stairs.”

I pointed him in the direction.

“Thanks, stay safe.” He stumbled down the stairs. I headed for the elevator and went to take a well-deserved nap.

**Author's Note:**

> Artistic criticism is always appreciated, for those who want to leave it. Thank you.


End file.
